Good Tomato Crop This Year

I really didnt expect to eat when I came over to the Usui's today to use the internet, but the local tomates are in and are delious. They don't need anything - not salt or pepper. The attached pictures in this post are of the Pure Malt Center.

Non-Translatable Humor

I think it was Nietzsche that said that all tragedy is universal, but humor is specific to time and place. I have found several examples that affirm this assertion - funny examples. We being Friday night at a dinner with Fukiko and her very nice family. Nearing the end of dinner talk turned to each other's countries' humor. We decided to try and find examples of our country's humor that would stump each other. Maybe a slightly pointless exercise but it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I said that Alberta has only two seasons - so far so good - winter and construction season. Well, needless to say, this went right over their heads. I had to explain it to them in detail. It was road construction I meant and there's a lot of it to be done in the summer. Why are your roads in such bad shape? Well, we have bad winters here and furthermore many heavy vehicles drive on them. In my opinion, once you have to explain a joke it normally nullifies the humor in it. So they, quite smartly on their part I think, choose a Japanese pun. Puns never ever translate well. This one had to do with the proper name of Japan - Nihon - and their counter system in Japanese for bottles and other thin objects "Nihon". Then they had a situation or phrase that you could use either meaning and get everything horribly and hariously confused. Which is how I felt, the joke going right over my head.

But all is not lost. At dinner the next night with the Usui's I discovered that somethings can be universally funny. Like almost everywhere in Japan, there is always a T.V. on somewhere in the room and so we came to have the T.V. on during dinner. Mr. Usui was only kind of half watching but noticed that the next story was about humans and animals (ducks) set in Obihiro. Well, we all perked up because Shikaoi is right next to Obihiro and it is unusual to see it on T.V. (No one pays much of any attention to Hokkaido in.) The short story focused on a guy - a man - that was responsible for the catch and release of birds and what not. The footage was of him releasing a white duck that he had raised himself from an egg into a pond. The viewer can see that the duck is very attached to its master and is a bit apprehensive to simply slip into the pond. Well, as soon as that duck hit the water it sank like a rock. It couldn't swim. We howled with laugher. It's just too absurd to think there's a duck that can't swim. And the image, this duck, feet in the air, paddling away. Then it sinks again. So eventually, to the man's concern and through our tears, he goes out and fishes it out of the water. The program follows his attempts to train the duck to swim in a little kitty pool and then after a month's practice returns to the pond. The same thing happens again with cameras rolling. The duck can't swim, it just sinks as soon as it hits the water. Well, the duck survived all this and is now a dry-land-only type duck living in a large enclosure at someone's house. I guess the real happy ending is that - without ever fulfilling its main and only purpose in life - it is not going to become someone's dinner.